DRIVEN MAD

THE INSANITY OF EVs AS A RESPONSE TO CLIMATE CHANGE

Nothing better sums up the inadequacy of our current responses to the apocalyptic threat of accelerating climate change — or says more about how we have inflicted this desperate situation on ourselves — than the bizarre idea electric vehicles (EVs) somehow form part of the ‘solution’.

Away from a relentless barrage of EV propaganda there is only one question that matters and it’s almost never asked; how many cars emitting dangerous greenhouse gases are actually on the planet’s roads? Known in industry jargon as the VIO (Vehicles In Operation) the total for 2023, counting cars alone, was around 1.45 billion, of which 1.41 billion (97%) were standard, fossil-fuel-burning internal combustion engine vehicles (known as ICEs) and 40 million were EVs i.e less than 3%.

1.45 billion is a 50% increase from 2015, the year of the UN Paris Climate Agreement where the world’s governments pledged to reduce emissions. This is no accident; at the 2016 World Economic Forum representatives of the same governments signed off on an auto-sector plan for 2 billion cars in circulation by 2040, at least 1.75 billion (85%) of which would be ICEs. In 2024 we are well are on track to exceed that target.

It’s worth taking a moment to let those numbers sink in — I had to take several. They make a nonsense of the alleged, widely-advertised ‘transition’ to EVs away from greenhouse-gas-emitting ICEs.

This phoney promotion of an EV revolution is the technological poster-child for ‘net-zero by 2050’, the strategy, also set in 2015, supposed to prevent us exceeding a 1.5°C (above pre-industrial) global temperature rise by 2100.Although still referred to by governments, corporations and media everywhere, this goal has already been made redundant by the real-world acceleration of climate change, way faster than predicted by scientists. In June 2024 a Guardian survey of 400 senior IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) contributing authors found 94% of them now think global heating will breach 1.5°C by 2030, if not sooner. As James Hansen says, the truth is the 1.5°C target is ‘deader than a doornail’.

The planetary consequences of the unforeseen speed of this heating are also wildly ahead of schedule. Increased ocean temperatures, record Antarctica, Arctic and permafrost melting and increased methane emissions — plus many more ‘feedback loops’ over which humanity has minimal control — have either caused or made much worse unprecedented extreme events including in the last few months alone:

- Extreme flooding over vast areas of southern Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, China, the Middle East, the USA, Indonesia and Europe — leaving thousands dead, millions displaced and agricultural yields decimated.

- Record extreme heat across South Asia, Asia, Africa and the US, causing many thousands more heat-related deaths, usually of the most vulnerable.

- Another early start to the US, Canadian and Russian wildfire seasons, threatening to surpass the record-breaking burning of 2023.

- Prediction of the most intense and violent North Atlantic hurricane season, kicked off early by the devastation caused by Hurricane Beryl, the earliest Cat 5 storm in the region and the mega-flooding brought by Hurricane Debby.

The same media outlets still peddling ‘net-zero by 2050’ refuse to join these climate dots, reporting them individually rather than as accumulating evidence of an accelerating global cataclysm, unfolding in real time. This widespread disconnection from observable reality — including by much of the ‘green movement’ and the IPCC executive whose latest advice still relies on out-dated ‘overviews’ of old science that did not anticipate this speed of change — is provoking individual scientists to break ranks. Professor Gretta Pecl, at the University of Tasmania said to the same Guardian survey, ‘We are headed for major societal disruption within the next five years. Authorities will be overwhelmed by extreme event after extreme event, food production will be disrupted. I could not feel greater despair over the future.’ Her attempt at sounding a realistic alarm went unheard; a disturbing backdrop of gruesome, geo-political conflicts and the financial stress facing many, means both the media and the rest of us are easy targets for the false promise of a transition to a cleaner, greener tomorrow featuring futuristic EVs.

This article details the auto-industry data supporting these extraordinary/insane numbers then considers the economic and related psychological factors preventing our species from implementing meaningful, simple (if radical) responses that would both reduce harm and require no new technology at all.

VIO-LENCE

The main way the apocalypse-threatening, increasing total VIO number is deliberately obscured is by a focus on EV sales. These are increasing but still made up just 6% of total sales in 2023 and no-one predicts the percentage of EVs in the total VIO rising to more than 15% by 2040. The ubiquitous media talk of an imminent ‘crossover’ to EVs from ICEs is thus completely misleading — no such transition is remotely in sight. Given the accelerating VIO the truth is those extra EVs, because they do still produce significant emissions (just less than ICEs), will also increase atmospheric greenhouse gas levels for at least the next decade — when every climate scientist on the planet is calling for immediate emissions reductions for us to have any hope of avoiding the worst.

Further, even if not so important in the context of the terrifying big picture, the percentage increase in EV sales actually went down in 2023 while the percentage increase for ICE sales went up:

· In 2022 80 million ‘light vehicles’ (cars plus small vans) were sold of which 13 million were EVs.

· In 2023 89 million light vehicles were sold of which 14 million were EVs — so 8 million more ICEs (up 12% of a larger total) against 1 million more EVs sold last year (up 7% of a much smaller total).

Other factors — in contrast to EV sales, highly relevant to our survival as a species but widely unreported — that cause ever-increasing greenhouse gas emissions from road transport include:

- Heavy commercial vehicles — more than 400 million on the roads are even less likely to become ‘electrified’ in significant numbers than passenger vehicles.

- Falling scrappage rates — leading to a booming ICE second-hand market, also boosted by EV buyers selling on their ICE vehicles (so not reducing the VIO).

- ‘Hybrid’ vehicles — counted as EVs but still emitting significant levels of greenhouse gases.

The Net-Zero Energy Transition Delusion

These 100% untrue claims for a ‘transition to EVs’ — so at odds with the observable facts they could, clinically-speaking, be diagnosed as psychotic — are fully integrated into the overarching, fantasy climate-narrative that ‘technology and net-zero will save us’. The IPCC executive, as distinct from individual scientists, and all governments and corporations everywhere still pretend this will achieve the vast emissions reductions needed to ‘beat’ climate change via a combination of 1. an ‘energy transition’ to renewables (where EVs feature significantly) and 2. atmospheric carbon dioxide removal (CDR). What everyone is too afraid to say is:

1. We are nowhere near an ‘energy transition’ — both total energy use and fossil fuel use are still increasing. Global energy consumption accelerated in 2023 (+2.2%), much faster than its average 2010–2019 growth rate (+1.5%) and 85% of this was fossil fuels. Of the renewables a significant further percentage was ‘biomass’ — aka burning wood — which emits huge amounts of CO2 but is falsely-included on the absurd basis the forests this destroys can be re-grown. Wind, solar, and tidal made up tiny, irrelevant percentages of the total as the graphic below shows (despite these being disguised by the use of similar colours) and will at best treble in the coming decade. Hence the hype around renewables replacing fossil fuels endorses something physically impossible; the misleading figures quoted relate only to electricity production, not the main engines of mining, heavy industry, transport etc etc.

2. At the same time, accelerating climate change impacts are reducing the capacity of natural carbon sinks, (forests, oceans and soil), to absorb greenhouse gases, way faster than we can protect them plus we are nowhere near developing technology to withdraw atmospheric carbon in meaningful amounts (CDR) ourselves. We’ve emitted 1400 billion tonnes of CO2 alone since 1850 and will emit 40 billion more in 2024 — current CDR techniques remove less than a few million tonnes per year and even profit-making promoters of these do not forecast this figure hitting 5 billion tonnes before 2040.

Beyond all this is the fact that ‘net-zero’ itself i.e. taking as many greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere as we emit, could not reduce the accelerating impact of what we’ve already put up there. CO2 alone has a delayed maximum effect of around 10 years before tailing off over centuries, thus significant increased temperatures way in excess of 1.5°C are now, literally, ‘baked in’ — and that’s without taking into account numerous other feedback loops that achieving net-zero would not meaningfully slow.

Proponents of renewables — in line with their EV cousins — ignore all this and instead point to inefficiencies in fossil fuel use, so-called ‘rejected energy’ which wind and solar would not incur hence reducing that 85% of the total energy consumed requiring ‘transitioning’ to around, say 60%. This ignores the fact that the vast capacity increase, plus related storage and grid resources, required for this 60% is still physically impossible, according to all experts. Plus even if the resources and technology existed for this (they don’t) it would also still require catastrophically epic levels of additional fossil fuel consumption and related emissions to implement — all at a time accelerating temperatures tell us there is already no carbon ‘budget’ left to do this. It’s also worth reiterating here that global temperature increases really are accelerating in spite of nearly $10 trillion being invested in renewables to date.

None of this is sensibly-debatable or deniable but it is avoided everywhere because no-one wants — or is able if they want to stay in a job — to face what this all inescapably means; only radical reductions in all human ‘economic’ activity — i.e. all non-essential consumption — could deliver the massive reductions in emissions we now need to avoid chaotic, violent, societal collapse. Radical like, for example, stopping all personal, individual car use.

How green are EVs anyway?

This question, in the irrelevant margins of the story of an ever-increasing fossil-fuelled VIO total, is where the existing debate is allowed to happen. And it happens ad nauseam — between EV advocates who style themselves as ‘environmental champions’ and those who cannot tolerate the slightest challenge to the inalienable right of ICE vehicles to propel us towards self-annihilation. Briefly, because they are 100% meaningless in our desperate climate context, the ‘debating points’ include:

- EV production — requires 20% more greenhouse gas emissions than ICEs

- EV lifetime emissions — estimated at between 30% and 75% of ICEs depending on electricity source i.e. still way more than our essential habitat can tolerate

- EVs heavier weight — causes more wear on infrastructure and highly-polluting tires

- Batteries — limitations on physical resources/advances/recycling

- EV infrastructure and charging times

- Safety — quieter, heavier EVs kill twice as many pedestrians per mile driven as the vast numbers already decimated by ICEs, three times more in urban areas.

- Etc etc etc

Anyone wanting to read (much) more about all this need only look at any news or social media outlet, where they can be sure not to encounter the ‘VIO’ or the uncomfortable reality that personal ownership of both ICEs and EVs is so irrationally destructive of our essential habitat.

Because underlying all of this is a universally taboo truth — personal cars, whatever their power source, were always an insane way of getting us around…

The real madness of ALL cars

To understand the insanity of an accelerating VIO number in the context of the desperate climate predicament we know we face, it helps to question something we take for granted; why are we so committed to personal cars for their simple task of moving us around? Imagine we were visited by friendly aliens offering assistance, then trying to answer when they would surely ask:

- Why does the typical car operate for less than 10% of its life — less than 2 hours per 24 — something we wouldn’t accept for trains, buses, taxis etc?

- Why do huge car ‘parks’ obliterate natural spaces when, say, the widespread use of taxi services instead (as now happens in many cities) would reduce/eliminate these?

- Why do we give up so much of our residential space to parked cars or give them their own ‘garage’ rooms within our homes?

- Why do cars run at 30% occupancy? The median number in a car is 1 with an average for all journeys of 1.5.

- Why are cars so over-powered? Standard high speeds exceed 100mph/160kpm — 50% higher than legal maximums and many go still faster.

- 40% of new car sales in 2023 were SUVs. Why are cars getting bigger, and include so much, rarely-used, payload space?

After we had been unable to answer any of these intelligently, our puzzled alien friends would no doubt get to the problem of safety, or the lack of it. Why do we allow cars to kill 1.5 million people, and seriously injure 50 million more, every year, of which 20% are pedestrians, including vast numbers of innocent children? Why don’t we care that all this avoidable suffering isn’t even cheap? Why don’t we want to cut the massive related costs to health care, emergency services and prevent all the working hours lost?

And how could we justify that the primary cause of this carnage is the cars themselves? The truth is, as the auto-industry will not admit, these machines simply cannot be operated safely by owner-drivers with the infrastructure and rules in place. It doesn’t matter if you’re careful and/or highly-skilled, there is a good chance you will get hurt or worse when (not if) some other driver makes an ‘error’. Something again we don’t tolerate for other forms of transport where whole systems are suspended until causes of accidents that kill tiny numbers by comparison are found — amid detailed, horrified media coverage. Why is it all we get after thousands of daily, fatal car crashes are chatty bulletins on the delays caused to other road users?

And all this, having led our alien visitors from confusion to exasperation, is before they ask us to defend the ultimately indefensible; why do we tolerate our ongoing use of personal cars, massively and avoidably,contributing to the increasing levels of greenhouse gases threatening to kill us all?

THE EASY ANSWERS

Maddest of all and most inexplicable to any objective observer — is that all this chaos, inefficiency and harm really could be very easily avoided. It really would be very simple, practically speaking — if not psychologically and ‘economically’ — to massively reduce the environmental impact of personal cars and their dangers and inefficiencies and make it easier to get everyone from A to B. We really could, almost immediately, bring in a new system to achieve all these things, something like this:

1. Phase in Uber-type taxi services only — with closely-regulated drivers — available in advance and on-demand.

2. Promote ‘sharing’ these services, like we ‘share’ trains etc — increasing occupancy rates.

3. Phase out personal car use.

4. Progressively switch taxi fleet to EVs — scrapping ICEs they replace.

5. Improve public sector transport — leading to reduction in taxi use.

6. Improve cycling and walking options in the extra road space created.

7. Make exceptions for emergency services and people with disabilities or in remote areas.

8. Compensate owners (for one car) with taxi credits.

9. Ensure system open to all — taxi prices include allocation to subsidies as needed.

10. Phase out personal car production/sales — license manufacture of safe vehicles for taxi use only.

It is notable the core elements of this plan and the technology to deliver iti.e. ending personal car use and promoting Uber-type taxi services, including shared-use, already operate in many big cities.

The benefits would be immediate and would include massively…

1. … improved journey times — way less traffic due to shared journeys and no time parking plus increased use of better public transport, safer cycling etc

2. … improved efficiency — vehicles operated for most of their lives

3. … improved and safer neighbourhoods — almost no local car parking

4. … increased driver competence — all-professional drivers — machines operated to high standards demanded of other professional drivers (trains etc)

5. … safer, purpose-built vehicles, acceleration/speed-limiters, monitoring of all journeys etc

6. … reduced death, injury and insurance costs — freeing up billions for health and emergency services

7. … increased health from lower pollution and more walking, cycling

8. … reduced maintenance costs of vehicles and infrastructure

9. … reduced emissions — from fewer journeys and significantly reduced production processes

Although essential to our survival and therefore only rational, this plan will seem ‘unthinkable’ to most even if, technically, practically it really would be simple to deliver. The problem is we are not as rational as we like to think,thus the explanations for the ongoing madness of our personal car use fall under the interconnected headings of money and collective psychology, two powerfully-irrational influences on human behaviour.

TRILLION$ — of reasons we can’t do the obvious…

The Global Finance and Banking Review describes the global auto-industry as one of the 5 ‘pillars of the world’s economy’. They are not wrong.

In 2023 the sector generated:

New Car Sales $2,750,000,000,000 ($2.75 trillion)

Used Car Sales $1,660,000,000,000

Repairs/Service $1,000,000,000,000

Car Parts Market $652,000,000

The industry forecaster ‘Future Market Insights’ predicts further massive growth in these numbers, including, crucially for the fossil-fuel VIO, the used car, repairs and parts sectors (virtually all ICEs), due to double again by 2033.

Plus of course, there are the several trillion dollars the oil industry makes from fuelling ICEs and at least another trillion in the auto insurance and finance sectors and more still in infrastructure, auto-racing, advertising and embedded auto-journalism.

More than a hundred million work more or less directly in the auto sector and many millions more livelihoods depend on these people, from the billionaires to the apprentice mechanics, paying their taxes and spending their earnings in the wider economy. None of this means they could not all be found other meaningful workin the context of the desperate climate predicament we all face — performing activities, for example, that help to prevent violent, chaotic, societal collapse — but a meaningful transition such as this would require our species to behave rationally, which is where psychology comes in…

DRIVING THE SELF-DESTRUCTIVE HUMAN PSYCHE; status, inclusion and self-love.

Beyond the deeply-mad fact that the influence of virtually anyone on our planet with any authority depends on their collusion with the madness of an ever-growing, fossil-fuelled economy of which the auto-industry is an integral part, is another fundamental problem — we are all psychologically-enmeshed in our relationships with our cars.

Owning a car is essential to our everyday role, responsibilities and related status within our social groups, both at work and in our personal lives — to maintain these, most of us simply can’t avoid car ownership.

Just as psychologically-vital as our in-group status, cars are the ultimate expression of our narcissistic self-love affairs, relentlessly encouraged by corporate culture to provoke insatiable consumption — we see our reflections in the cars we drive, we ego-identify with these.

Fast/expensive cars don’t only display status to others but to their drivers too. The macho display of young (and not young) ‘performance’ car drivers, usually men, is easy to deride but it’s embraced by hundreds of millions and reinforced by influential, Top Gear-type shows promoting reverence for the best machines and those who own them. The auto-industry simultaneously exploits the primitive drives encouraging many women, in a ruthlessly competitive and fearful society, to be more attracted to such flaunting or to make their own displays of dangerously-oversized SUVs, representing their ability to protect themselves and their families. Others are targeted for how sensible their car choice makes them look and feel — when the harm to the atmosphere from their overpowered machines is still on the wrong side of catastrophic. EVs are simply more of the same — selling the bogus chance, to those who often feel a genuine need, to display ‘environmental-consciousness’.

On top of the influential thought-leadership of a legion of wannabe Jeremy Clarksons, the normalising of car ownership is relentlessly reinforced everywhere. Commercial radio alone routinely runs 3–4 auto-industry adverts per hour — for the sales of new and second-hand ICEs and EVs and the cheap finance that allows mass ownership of reassuringly-high-tech vehicles.

All this ensures public consciousness, never mind debate, doesn’t go anywhere near the VIO — or make the connection between this number and probable societal collapse. We are pushed instead to remain car addicts, maintained at the pre-contemplative stage of ‘giving up’, in complete denial of the dangers of our habit. EV users have simply been moved to the bargaining stage, they’ve switched from cocaine to opium, slightly less harmful maybe, but still lethal. For most, not having a car remains unthinkable, a sign of poverty, vulnerability, failure and exclusion.

EVs do nothing to challenge this love-struck madness plus they reinforce our ultimate, collective, grandiose delusion that technology, representing our fantasy of dominion over the epic forces of Nature, will save us from the cataclysmic consequences of our climate actions.

The (only sane) conclusion

Away from our collective madness, the undeniable fact is continued personal car use is catastrophic for the habitat essential to our survival on this planet — and the fantasy of a ‘transition’ to EVs sustains nothing except the auto industry. It’s not the only human activity we need to drastically reduce, but it is a significant one; doing so would represent our species taking this threat seriously at last.

Yes, we would need to drastically change our economic system but this could at least be managed — unlike the chaos of collapse we are accelerating towards.

This feels psychologically unrealistic because it is, in the almost complete absence of a collective understanding of the urgency of our desperate climate predicament. Even most of those paying attention are enmeshed, practically and psychologically, in the delusional narrative of a techno-future powered by ‘renewables’. Very few understand that, however ‘unrealistic’responses like stopping personal car use might seem, these represent our only realistic chances of reducing the unprecedented levels of harm coming our way.

In this context it is unsurprising that ‘petrolheads’ would rather rip out their chest hair than give up their precious killing-machines and most ‘normal people’ too would protest against any removal of their ‘right’ to drive. But this could all change and quickly — the experience of war-time impacts on collective opinions and behaviours tells us so. The status bestowed by car ownership could be reversed, if people felt that it was giving them up that won the approval and acceptance of friends and the wider community. The likes of Jeremy Clarkson, able to lead public understanding way more effectively than the IPCC or activists, could achieve this kind of shift using their intelligence, charisma and communication skills to de-radicalise perceptions of the actions we simply must take.

Clarkson recently claimed his past denialist comments were ‘a joke’, following his experience of the brutal impacts of the changing climate in his new role as a celebrity farmer. But humanity needs way more from the likes of him; he needs to ‘grow a pair’, as he might say, because we don’t need any more complicated-sounding science to explain our desperate predicament, it’s actually very simple and someone like Clarkson could do this. Away from all the jargon and maths on one side, and the idiotic denialism and techno-magical thinking on the other, climate change is easily understood via basic mechanics and the laws of Nature. If you can understand the workings of a car engine, you can understand greenhouse gases, jet streams, ocean temperatures and related extreme events — it’s simple cause and effect. People don’t need to be ‘environmentalists’ or ‘green’ and they don’t need any more convoluted, scientific ‘research’ to get the ‘why’ of these unprecedented threats; they only need the latest facts presented live and accessibly.

Abandoning our love affair with the car would symbolise the end of the fantasy of our dominion over Nature — and would touch psychological raw-nerves — but we can be collectively driven by far more powerful forces, like our instinct to protect our loved ones and to behave unselfishly in noble causes. Clarkson — with his notable support of altruistic behaviour by military personnel who sacrifice themselves — is the type of personality that just might cut through. Perhaps he could get significant numbers to understand we really have reached the point where our shiny technology cannot save us, where only drastic behavioural changes like stopping personal car use can have any impact now. One thing for sure, unless someone finds a way to get us all to face the undeniable facts, time is fast running out before we accelerate, pedal-to-the-metal, over the edge.

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